Murder defendant's motel visit in victim's car

Updated 6:41 pm, Tuesday, November 5, 2013

A GPS monitoring device on the ankle of a parolee was disabled shortly after he rode to a West Oakland motel in a federal defender's investigator's car the night she disappeared, prosecutors and a state parole agent said Tuesday.

Randy Alana was at the Night's Inn Motel at 874 W. MacArthur Blvd. from 8:43 p.m. to 9:21 p.m. on Aug. 4, the night Sandra Coke was last seen, state parole agent Steve Reinhart testified at a preliminary hearing in Alameda County Superior Court. Alana is accused of murdering Cook, a longtime acquaintance whose body was found in Vacaville five days after she vanished.

Alana, 56, was wearing a GPS device because he was designated as a high-risk sex offender and had recently been paroled after serving a sentence for robbery. GPS records show that the night Coke disappeared, he walked to the corner of 52nd Street and Shattuck Avenue in North Oakland, a few blocks from Coke's home, and got into a car at 8:30 p.m. that drove to the motel, Reinhart said.

Prosecutors believe the car was Coke's Mini Cooper. At 9:22 p.m., footage from a surveillance camera showed the car being driven north on nearby Market Street, police said. A minute later, the GPS tracking stopped.

Alana has admitted that he removed his ankle monitor, authorities said.

Coke's work cell phone was found in West Oakland about 10:15 p.m., police Officer Steven Bang wrote in an affidavit.

About the same time, Coke's personal cell phone was detected by a cell tower in Crockett, Bang wrote. Minutes later, the Mini Cooper was recorded crossing the Carquinez Bridge into Vallejo.

Coke's phone also activated cell sites in Vallejo and Vacaville, near where her body was later found. The phone was then carried south and its signal was picked up by a tower in Pinole, police said.

Police said surveillance camera footage showed Alana driving Coke's car after midnight to a 7-Eleven in San Pablo, where he used her debit card to withdraw $400.

Coke's personal phone was found in Richmond on Aug. 5, and her car was found the same day in Oakland. When Alana was arrested Aug. 6 in Pittsburg for a parole violation, Bang wrote, he had Coke's car keys and debit card.

An autopsy determined that Coke, 50, a federal defender's investigator in Sacramento, had been strangled.

Alana and Coke had a teenage daughter, and authorities believe the two reconnected after he was released from prison last year. Tensions between the two flared after Coke's cocker spaniel disappeared in May and Coke, believing he had something to do with it, called his parole agent.

The agent and sheriff's deputies arrested Alana, who missed his mother's funeral while in custody on a parole violation for about a month.

Alana has pleaded not guilty to charges that he murdered Coke, stole her car and used her bank cards. Judge Thomas Reardon will decide at the end of the preliminary hearing whether there is enough evidence to try him.